Around Christmas last year, I was sitting in front of a patio fireplace in the courtyard when it occurred to me that I had what I needed to fulfill a wish I’d harbored since childhood. I had the hot coals of a hardwood fire and chestnuts, the gift of a neighbor.
My fascination with roasting chestnuts began in the Decembers of the late 1940s, when I was enjoying life as an only child, anticipating Christmas and walking around my house listening to the radio. I’m confident of this because my earliest memories of that house are a secure awareness of two things: my mother and music on the radio.
Recorded in 1946, Nat King Cole’s song about chestnuts roasting on an open fire was already a Christmas standard by then. It is that song, more than “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” or “Deck the Halls” or even “Silent Night,” that evokes childhood Christmases for me.
Nat King Cole. That voice. He could have sung a grocery store shopping list, and it would have been a hit. It was Cole’s butter-smooth bass that made me yearn for chestnuts roasted, not in an oven, but on an open fire. It would take about seventy years for me to fulfill that desire.
Along the way, I learned that the song I knew as “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” was actually called “The Christmas Song,” written by Mel Tormé and Bob Wells. In a song that includes every popular reference to Christmas imaginable, there is but one line of six words about chestnuts roasting on an open fire. That’s it. Chestnuts. Roasting. On. An. Open. Fire. Yet, that image, along with Cole’s voice, makes “The Christmas Song,” in my book, the best song ever about Christmas.
It was written on a sweltering July day in Los Angeles in 1945. Tormé arrived at the home of songwriting partner Wells to find on the piano these lines on a pad of paper. “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire; Jack Frost nipping at your nose. Yuletide carols being sung by a choir, and folks dressed up like Eskimos.”
When Wells appeared in tennis clothes, he told Tormé that he’d dashed off the lines in an attempt to cool off by “thinking cool.” Over the next forty-five minutes, the writers composed a song and melody that captured everything good about Christmas, real and implied.
Tormé might easily have recorded the song himself, but he thought he and Wells had something worthy of the great Nat King Cole. Cole loved it, but it would be late fall 1946 before Cole had time to record “The Christmas Song.”
"Nat King Cole. That voice. He could have sung a grocery store shopping list, and it would have been a hit. It was Cole’s butter-smooth bass that made me yearn for chestnuts roasted, not in an oven, but on an open fire."
Tormé’s version is hammy but worth a listen. If you want goose bumps, listen to Cole.
Last Christmas, warming myself before an outside fire, I remembered that gift of a small sack of chestnuts. Oh, rapturous joy. I would play “The Christmas Song” on my cell phone while roasting my own chestnuts.
My movie memories of street vendors roasting chestnuts for eager customers with cheeks all aglow called for a small, hot, contained fire and chestnuts. The vendors scooped up the roasted chestnuts with a trowel-like shovel to deposit the piping hot delicacy into expertly fashioned paper cones.
Ed Cullen
Chestnuts roasted by the author, Ed Cullen.
What could be simpler? I had a hand-size coal shuttle into which I placed a half dozen chestnuts. I lay the nut-filled shuttle on the coals and waited for the chestnuts to cook to the point of steaming and starting to open—as shown on YouTube. Carefully, I lifted the handle of the shuttle with a gloved hand to place the treat of all Christmas treats on a brick to cool.
After a few minutes, I cut open the biggest chestnut with my pocketknife and took a bite.
Bleah! I spit out what tasted like hot smushed acorns and burned yellow grits sprinkled with car battery acid. Websites offered suggestions of spices, herbal teas and other things that might make roasted chestnuts palatable.
I wasn’t having it. “The Christmas Song” and countless movie scenes of snowy city streets and chestnuts roasting say nothing about adding stuff to chestnuts so you can choke them down. Ale, maybe. Yes, ale would be good, but only if you left out the eating chestnuts part.
There you have my Yule offering. I still love the song, the music of Nat King Cole, the memory of my mother, and walking through my first house to songs of Christmas on the radio.
